It's amazing how far they'll go to miss the point, these evolution denialists. Take this read of J. Craig Venter's paper in PLoS Biology of the Sorcerer II Global Ocean Sampling Expedition from Jonathan Witt.

"In addition to increasing substantially the size and diversity of these families," the article reports, "the GOS sequences increased the understanding of the evolution and function of these proteins" (emphasis mine). The article offers a repair protein by way of illustration:

One example is those that repair DNA damage due to UV light (photolyases). While sunlight has benefits to the microbes, like with humans, sunlight also has the potential to be harmful to cells exposed to it. The team discovered many new proteins that protect these organisms from UV ray damage and some that are involved in repairing UV damage. These proteins were found in all organisms in the dataset, even in viruses.

So where is the evidence of a gradually evolving UV-Ray-Damage-Repairing protein? How does this increase our understanding of the evolution of these proteins from fundamentally different proteins? It seems to suggest that everywhere we look in the biological world, the UV-ray-damage-repairing proteins are always already up and running at full speed. Perhaps we are learning that the evolutionary process in such proteins is like the singing frog from the Looney Tunes cartoon, the one who would never sing when there was an audience.

Wow. Talk about missing the point. So for those who don't know, Venter is the guy who used to be Pres and CEO of Celera Genomics, the company that developed shotgun sequencing and raced the Human Genome Project towards sequencing the complete human genome (although they ultimately collaborated). Now that that's over, Venter is just ridiculously rich, so he sails around on a yacht collecting samples from oceans around the world, filtering the samples from various depths by size, then shotgun sequencing the genomes that come out of his filters. They can essentially filter viruses, bacteria, and larger multicellular organisms and then shotgun sequence. This allows him to accomplish two main objectives:

1. Create a baseline of the biocontent/biodiversity of different regions of oceans.
   
2. Allow them to discover thousands of new genes.
   

One of the things I learned about the ocean from reading about Venter's little quest is that it is literally teeming with life. It is essentially soup. Every milliliter is chock-full of billions of bacteria, viruses and other tiny little organisms. It's fascinating stuff, and fits with the idea that life began in the sea. But what does the creationist take out of this? That because they didn't explain all of evolution in a sequencing survey of the oceans, they can't talk about evolution at all. This is interesting. Apparently, now, all biologists, in order to be fair to denialists, are no longer allowed to assume evolution created life when discussing their research!

This is fascinating. I don't even know how to characterize this. Is this impossible expectations? Logical fallacy? It's a little mind-boggling. I'm going to go for straw man at the moment, because the argument rests on the assumption that this survey should have shown every transitional protein on the way to the final evolved form as part of a survey of genes. But also, impossible expectations because this is the first time anyone has ever even looked at this stuff and they're supposed to explain the entire evolutionary history, in a single paper?

Labels: Evolution denialism